Differentiators for High-End Support Plans
Support plans are becoming more standardized, and it’s a good thing, I think, since customers are getting used to a certain level of service associated with each level of support.
One area that’s not standardizing as much is high-end plans, and that makes sense since high-end plans, by definition, are geared towards large customers, who may have very specific needs depending on the underlying service or products supplied by the vendor. Here is an annotated list of features that are specific to high-end plans, with comments on how frequently they are offered and suggestions for whether they are right for your environment. Please post additional comments on your experience!
Self-Service Features
Self-service may not be the first thing that comes to mind when designing high-end plans, but it should be, since it allows to both deliver value to the customer and gain efficiency internally.
This is not common, but providing a custom portal to high-end customers, complete with direct access to their entire team (so not just support), including the CSM, sales rep, sales engineer, etc. is relatively easy to do, and is very useful if the team is large on the vendor’s side.
Service Delivery Features
Tight response SLAs are almost always included in high-end plans. For instance, if regular plans offer a 1-hour response, the high-end plan may offer 30 minutes.
A named support engineer is also a common feature, with the benefit to customers being that the engineer becomes knowledgeable with the customers’ business operations and the most important product/services the customer uses.
From the vendor’s side, it can be a challenge to staff named engineers, especially if you have a wide product line that makes it difficult for one individual to know it all–but customers really like the idea of a single contact! If you want to offer named engineers, specify that the named engineer is available only during business hours. And you can offer even faster response times.
An excellent alternative to named support engineers, especially with wide product lines, is access to a team of senior support engineers (but again customers don’t love that as much, even though in practice it can work better).
Escalation paths are common for high-end plans. They typically include levels of escalation (all the way to an executive), timing for when each level will get involved, and frequency of updates. Since high-end customers typically demand extra service during escalations anyway, offering a preset escalation path is not an extra burden. Make sure that the frequency of updates is reasonable. For instance, there’s no need to provide hourly updates while fixes are created, and little benefit to having to participate in ongoing conference calls.
Relationship Management Features
Almost all high-end plans include a named Customer Success Manager (CSM) or account manager, responsible for orchestrating the business relationship. At the high end, ratios of CSMs to customers can be much lower than for other customers, say 1:2 or 1:3 instead of the more typical 1:7 or 1:10.
The CSM will also do more than for regular customers. Onsite business reviews are common, usually annually or even twice a year.
Technical reviews of the customers’ implementation are fairly common. They are small consulting engagements that occur once a year and focus on both supportability and upselling.
A not very common, but useful and fairly straightforward high-end option is access to an executive champion. Assigning a VP to manage the relationship at an executive level is relatively inexpensive, since the largest customers would have that visibility anyway, and customers love it.
It is useful to assign customers to non-support executives, and it can open their eyes to the reality of customers’ experiences.
Other Features
As noted above, high-end plans can include anything that makes sense for your customers. Here are three suggestions.
Attendance at the user conference is somewhat common. It could be a set of free tickets, or a discount. Even better, offer attendance to special events such as executive meetings or a technical track just for larger customers.
Discounts on training or consulting are not common, and they don’t always make sense since companies may have separate budgets for these activities anyway.
I don’t see seats on the customer council very often, but it could be a great perk. It could be a guaranteed seat when other customers have a rotating presence–or perhaps it makes sense to have a special, VIP-only council.
What do you include in your high-end plans? And what’s been more trouble than it’s worth? Please share.
